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With 282 Soldiers and Airmen still on duty and heavily engaged in supporting state and local emergency agencies, the Delaware National Guard’s role is far from over.

“We made it through the snow, but the job’s not done,” as Maj. Gen. Frank Vavala, the Adjutant General, just put it to leaders on a conference call.

In just the last few hours our county task forces report significant increases in the number “missions” we are conducting. Of the 250 missions the DNG has conducted in the second wave of this storm, about 50 are currently ongoing. Task forces report that our operations tempo, or the number of requests we have been tasked to support, has nearly doubled between 5 a.m. this morning and 1 p.m. this afternoon.

That increase in support requests has been mainly for transport of dialysis patients (all 3 counties), assisting stranded motorists (all 3 counties), and working with DelDOT to clear roads of stranded or abandoned vehicles (mostly in Sussex).

The Delaware National Guard has also provided transportation to emergency shelters in each county, with less than 10 people going into shelters in NCC, 25 in Kent, and 20 in Sussex. *These numbers reflect only DNG transport, not actual numbers in the American Red Cross-run shelters.

We have conducted over 600 missions since the first wave of the storm hit Friday night. But that figure does not reveal much, as DNG vehicles on their way out or way back from missions are stopping to assist stranded motorists.

Partly because of this and partly because of the frenetic pace, we won’t be able to provide exact numbers–of how many dialysis patients were transported, how many stranded motorists were rescued, how many citizens were evacuated from areas without power, or how many vehicles were cleared from the roads–any time soon. As soon as we have estimates, we will provide them.